The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is by all means a massive commercial and critical success, but six years later fans everywhere are still debating over one of its most integral item and combat features: weapon durability. Well, we’ve played a few hours of the upcoming sequel to Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and it turns out it has some interesting and strange new additions and tweaks to the weapon durability system.
Let’s get this out of the way right off the Boko Bat: your weapons will definitely still break in Tears of the Kingdom. You’ll pick up low level swords, spears, and sticks, smack them against a bad guy a few times, do a little damage, and then watch your weapon shatter to pieces in the middle of a fight, sending you scrambling through your inventory for a backup.
But Link’s got a really cool new power this time around called Fuse that allows you to strengthen and enhance the properties of a weapon by fusing another item to it. Not only does it make your weapon less likely to break quickly, it also means they’ll do more damage against enemies. Find a horn or a spikey ball in the world, fuse it to your sword, and start attacking. Now your weak sword is a stronger sword which will enhance its durability but it still won’t stop it from breaking, it will just delay the inevitable.
However, before your weapon breaks, you can unfuse it from what you originally fused it to, then fuse a brand new item to it which should effectively reset its durability. Unfusing a weapon from an item will destroy the item, but retain the weapon, so if you’ve got a bunch of opals and gems in your inventory, you can hypothetically cycle through them and fuse them to the same weapon over and over as long as you unfuse them right before they break.
This essentially means you can make a weapon last for a much, much longer time now, assuming you have access to enough things to keep fusing it to so you can retain its strength before it shatters. And since you can Fuse weapons to basically anything, including trash like rocks, apples, and even random mushrooms, the chance you’ll run out of Fuse items are slim.
Fuse it up
We first saw that Fusing extends weapon durability during the recent gameplay demonstration with Aonuma, but with our hands on, it looks like it goes further now that we know we can “unfuse” and “refuse.” We’ll still need to test this system thoroughly to see if there are any limitations, of course, but for now it’s looking really promising.
Breath of the Wild didn’t really dole out stronger, higher level weapons until players got a bit deeper into the game and started defeating tougher enemies who would then drop better items, but it seems that Tears of the Kingdom will circumvent that a bit by letting players build a whole personal armory of stronger swords, arrows, and shields, assuming they can find the materials to fuse them to.
So what do you think about these weapon durability upgrades in Tears of the Kingdom? Are you excited for them? If you didn’t like the breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild, are these changes enough to sell you on the sequel? Let us know in the comments below.
In the meantime we’ve got tons more Tears of the Kingdom preview coverage on IGN and YouTube right now so hop on over and check it out.
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Additional reporting by Casey DeFreitas
Brian Altano is an executive producer and host at IGN. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise, Link’s Awakening is his favorite game of all time, and he’s never finished Skyward Sword despite several valiant attempts.
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